Requiem
by Ishafel
Summary: All those who died are not mourned, and all those are mourned are not dead.
1. Smoke Rings in the Dark

            Requiem

Smoke Rings in the Dark 

**Under the wide and starry sky,**

**Dig the grave and let me lie.**

**Glad did I live and gladly die,**

**And I laid me down with a will.**

**This be the verse you grave for me:**

**_Here he lies where he longed to be;_**

**_Home is the sailor, home from sea,_**

**_And the hunter home from the hill._******

--Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem"

They are dying men marching (metaphorically) tiredly on a muddy road beneath the faded banner of a dead cause.  They are finished and they know it, and even the first signs of spring in the (metaphorical) clearing where they have stopped to rest do not lighten their spirits.  They believe that spring will come to London, Hogsmeade, Dolwydellan; they believe that this is the land all causes lead to where the flowers grow and even snowflakes are unique and special but they know they will not see these things because their lives are over.

            What would you do if everything you were, everything you had, was lost in a heartbeat?  If you lost your family, your money, your freedom, your best friend, your greatest love, your faith?  Would you marry hastily and badly, turn to prescription drugs, have wild passionate sex with a woman you hated, make a thousand bad decisions, cry yourself to sleep every night for the rest of your life?

            Pansy Parkinson lost her virginity to Draco Malfoy on a warm September night.  To be accurate, of course, she did not lose it so much as give it away, and Draco was kind to her and careful and did his best to see that she enjoyed it—rare quality in a sixteen-year old boy.  There was no blood and it did not hurt as much as she had expected and all in all, Pansy was rather disappointed in sex.  She had been in love with Draco since she was thirteen and she had expected that this, of all things, would make her feel—something.

            She lay on her back beside Draco and thought about him, trying to explain to herself what it was she loved.  The Malfoys were different, of course; everyone knew they were not like the other great wizarding houses.  They were neither the oldest house nor the wealthiest—neither particularly old nor truly wealthy by wizarding standards; they held a minor title they had not used in centuries; they were far too involved in trade and politics, far too occupied with power and not nearly occupied enough with pleasure.  Her father had said once that the problem with the Malfoys is that they take everything so _seriously_ and now, lying beside the half undressed Draco on a pile of their clothes, wrapped only in his white linen shirt, she thinks that maybe this is true.  

            Certainly everything is deadly serious to Draco; in Quidditch, school, and sex, he always plays for keeps.  He is a terrible loser and a dirty fighter and a brilliant student, and she rather thinks that whatever went wrong tonight was wrong with her and not with him, because he has a reputation as a lover as well.  Whatever Draco does, he does well, and wherever he goes he will rise to the top.  He is lying on his back now, his right arm over his eyes, his left holding a still lit, hand-rolled marijuana cigarette, and he is the most beautiful boy she has ever seen.  Even in repose there is an intensity to him that no one else has, as if he is lying in wait like a hunter.

            She must have fallen asleep, because when she opens her eyes again he has drawn away and is sitting silhouetted against the window, his jeans still half buttoned and his hair in his face, but now he feels a thousand miles distant and hard as stone.  When he sees that she is awake he stands, stubs out the joint on the ledge, and crosses to help her to her feet.  They stand like that, awkwardly, her hands clasped in his, their eyes almost level because he is short for his age and she is tall.  Then he leans in and kisses her, and his mouth tastes like smoke and spice and something salty that she realizes years later is her—is Pansy.

            "I'm sorry, Pansy," Draco says to her now.  "I shouldn't have done this, I think—I think that I'm in love with Blaise."  He turns and goes, and she watches him and her eyes fill up with tears.

            Draco was the first but there were others after him, though none of them meant anything.  There was Ron Weasley, during the war, and Malcolm after it but that was a mistake, and there was Cho, which was something else again.  Cho had been a Death Eater, a traitor to both sides, though she did not think Pansy knew.  Cho thought they were building a life together, the way Malcolm before her had.

            And then Draco Malfoy came back to England, like a dark comet returning to orbit, and Pansy felt alive again for the first time in years, though it was hatred and not love that burned through her veins.  She saw Draco at the first round of the World Cup, saw him up close in the crush outside the stadium.  He was standing with Harry Potter and Potter was holding his wrist hard enough to bruise and there was a bite mark on his neck that Draco had tried to hide with concealing zit cream but that showed through anyway.  Draco turned his head and looked past her (as if he had ever seen her, as if anyone had) and his eyes were the flat gray of unforged iron, and his face was very tan and there were a fine web of lines beginning to fan around his eyes and mouth.  His body was narrow and hard and his arms under the thin cotton shirt were ridged with muscle.  He was not perfect anymore, exactly, but he was still far too pretty for his own good.

            Pansy knew then that she would never have him.  He was Potter's now, he was no one's; he was his own self—but he was not for her.  Draco owed her, and there was one thing of his he could give her.  Her brothers were useless—still children, really—and there was the succession of the Parkinson line to consider.  Her father would have been so pleased; he had always hoped Draco would sire the heir to his house.  Well, he hadn't really, but he probably hadn't hoped that his favorite daughter would betray his cause and fight against him and bear the children of the man who had killed him, either.  

            It was surprisingly easy, getting access to Draco Malfoy:  the only surprise was that she was not the first.  Four thousand Galleons would have paid a year's rent on a small flat in London, or bought a small car; instead her "donation" to the British National Quidditch team purchased one night with Draco.  Fortunately she had always been good at Potions, and she was able to brew up a really top class one for the occasion.  She had no doubt that were it possible, she would conceive that night.

            Draco did not appear to be overly shocked at seeing her; apparently he had been expecting someone and she would do.  He was sprawled on the enormous, half-unmade, bed watching a pornographic movie featuring two women performing fellatio on a small Hungarian Horntail.  Pansy moved in front of him and pulled off her shirt.  She wasn't wearing anything under it, and she noted with appreciation that Draco's attention was now firmly on her.  "I want your baby," she told him, and he smiled as he pulled her down on top of him, though his eyes were anxious and unhappy.  It must be difficult, having to perform on demand; unlike a stallion he would know that his life would be forfeit should he fail to be of use.  For a brief, vicious moment, she was amused—she could think of no worse fate for the man who had so thoroughly screwed them all. 

            He came into her hard, harder than she had expected, and she began to grow excited despite herself, because after all he had done he was still Draco Malfoy, and when he climaxed she came as well.  He rolled off of her and they lay side by side for a long moment like lost children.  Draco's breathing slowed, quieted, and he turned to her and said coldly, "Get out of here.  Now."  

            Pansy stood up.  She could smell him on herself like some imported perfume, and her thighs ached and her hair was matted and she felt sticky and sweaty.  She pulled her shirt on, doing the buttons rather higher than usual to hide the love mark on her right breast, and stepped into her skirt.  Bending to slip on her shoes, she risked a glance at him, but Draco was watching the television again.  One of the women was having anal intercourse with the little dragon.  She looked as if it rather hurt.  "That's what it's like to sleep with Potter."  Draco's voice was brutal.  "That's what my life has become."

            Pansy left without a word, moving quickly through the hotel lobby, past the crowded bar to the cool dimness of the car park.  Her little silver Jaguar beeped affectionately at her as she slid behind the wheel and she blinked back tears.  But once she was on the road again, heading toward the Channel and England like speeding silver bullet, she began to feel all right again.  Draco had got what he deserved, surely, and she would have her baby, grown beneath her heart and born to her love.

            Now, in the darkness, Pansy is slowly regaining what Draco stole from her when they were both sixteen.  In a few minutes, she will emerge from the tunnel, and then it will be three hours to Parkinson Manor.  Once she is there she will let Cho make love to her one last time, and when the other woman's mouth is on Pansy's breast, her fingers deep in Pansy's body, Pansy will use her cell phone to call the Ministry and report Cho to them.   

            In nine months her baby will be born, child of two vastly powerful bloodlines and the one great hatred, and with any luck it will have its father's unearthly beauty and its mother's ruthlessness.  With any luck Voldemort, Lucius Malfoy, Harry Potter will be only names to it, the forces that shaped its parents' lives but have no effect on its own.  With any luck this child will be as slow to love as Draco and as faithful as Pansy and wiser and happier than either of them. 

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  This is the first in a series of short character sketches.  They are part of the same Potterverse as my long story Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, but they are meant to be supplementary stand-alones.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.


	2. If God Will Send His Angels

Requiem

If God Will Send His Angels 

            There are a thousand and one ways and more that a man can be broken, and 

Vincent Crabbe knows all of them intimately.  He learned his lessons well, when Draco 

Malfoy sold him to the Dark Lord they had once refused to serve.  Oh, Vin knows everything that can be done to make a man scream—he has seen men die of nothing more than the telling.  Well.  He has not seen much of anything lately.  He can remember, though, and his dreams are filled with tortures, all of them leading up to that one defining moment, when Voldemort had held the glowing red poker to his eyes, while Draco Malfoy lay in a pool of blood and vomit.  

            Of course, he did not see anything after that:  the delicate nerves that connected his eyes to his brain were irreparably damaged the moment they came in contact with the heat, and though they say that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king in truth there is no land of the blind.  But Pansy described it all to him, what happened next, and sometimes he thinks he can remember seeing it, it is all so clear in his mind.  Draco Malfoy rising like the sun and becoming a golden falcon that flies like a bullet toward Voldemort's throat, and afterward when all the pieces of Voldemort that are left would fit in a carryout bag at a nice restaurant.

            All of his memories come irretrievably back to Draco Malfoy.  Vin, and Greg who was his cousin and closest friend and died of fear, spent all their lives in Draco's shadow.  They never minded it:  never minded being always a second too slow, a heartbeat behind, because Draco never let them mind it.  It seemed right that he would always be ahead, because he is the Malfoy heir and they are only younger sons of younger sons of younger sons.  And then Draco left forever, and Vin came out of his shadow and into the shadows in which he will spend the rest of his life.

            The lives of the blind, the scarred, the ruined, are made of small humiliating moments.  Every day Vin starts over—learns the geography of himself, his flat, his neighborhood, his world, the geography of a computer keyboard, the men's bathroom at the Ministry, of a woman's body.  He learns everything from scratch every day.

            Until Draco Malfoy came back to England, Vin would have said (had said, in fact) that there is no room in the life of a blind man for hatred, for revenge.  It was not, in fact, true then, and it is not true now.  Vin wants Draco dead as much as anyone.  Yet, his job, his livelihood, depends on Draco; in this new harsher England there are few enough jobs for a blind man and a Death Eater's son.  Vin oversees (ironic, how it all comes back to sight) the Malfoy Trust—the Malfoy lands and properties, which Draco traded to Lestrange for some tiny sum.  Only, of course, by wizarding law he was underage, and Malfoy House itself is entailed, and the current heir having vanished the Ministry had confiscated the lot to hold for Draco's children or, on his death, the next Malfoy.  Vin is good at what he does because his father was Lucius Malfoy's steward and he was brought up to be Draco's and to do exactly what he is doing.

            Despite all of this he hates Draco and will kill him if he can.  He has come here to Hogwarts, a blind man sliding on the ice and using his cane to pick a path where once he would have strode confidently.  Ostensibly he is meant to be talking business but today his business is death.  Draco's office is the one that once was Vector's—a child leads him but in truth he remembers the way and could have found it on his own—and it is still small and claustrophobic and smells faintly of American cigarettes and more faintly of blood, illness, some vast dark unhappiness.  There is a rustle of robes as Draco stands, moves smoothly around the desk, takes the hand Vin offers.

            Neither of them says anything for a long moment.  Draco breathes slowly, shallowly, as if it hurts him to do even that.  The air around him reeks of defeat, pain, and loss.  He smells broken the way Greg smelled broken, the kind of broken that happens without torture.  Vin realizes that Draco Malfoy is waiting for death and that he will not fight it, but cannot bring himself to say the words.  His left hand, still in his pocket, looses its death grip on his wand; he exhales, reaches into his briefcase for the papers that need to be signed.

            "I just need you to look these over," he says finally.  "Let me know what you think, Professor."

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  This is the second in a series of short character sketches.  They are part of the same Potterverse as my long story Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, but they are meant to be supplementary stand-alones.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.


	3. Written in the Stars

Requiem

_Written in the Stars_

            Harry had never dreamed how difficult it would be, to be in love with Draco Malfoy.  He had never imagined Draco would be able to hurt him so easily.  Draco was all right angles and sharp edges, and whenever Harry so much as brushed against him he got cut.  He had never imagined love could be like this.  He had thought it would be all flowers and candy and puppies and holding hands; instead it was bruises and nightmares and harsh words and burning.  

            He was fairly sure that Draco was a large part of the problem; it seemed that Draco had been somehow damaged irreparably, by his childhood or the war or Blaise's death, or by his years in exile, or by some combination of those things.  Draco did not like to be touched—more specifically, he did not like Harry to touch him.  He did not want to hold Harry's hand, or for Harry to take his hand; he did not want to be kissed good morning, good night, goodbye; he did not want his hair stroked or a casual pat on the shoulder or a hug.  Harry, raised without human contact, had always believed touch was an important part of love.

            Draco did not like any kind of touch at all, not even a mouth on his collarbone, a hand sliding down his stomach.  Draco could take or leave sex, and Harry was more than a little afraid that had he been given a choice he would have preferred to leave it.  The one thing Draco wants—to take Harry—is the one thing Harry is not sure he can do.  They have only done _that_ once, and though Harry enjoyed it, he is very much afraid that it is wrong, is queer.  Hermione, trying delicately to make sure he is being safe, has emphasized that it is natural, that wizarding laws are dated and wrong.  Draco has no problem with it, of course, but Harry has come to realize that Draco is not always capable of distinguishing right from wrong where his own interests are concerned.

             Tonight, while Draco is sleeping, Harry and Ron are meeting in the tiny hotel bar.  It is ironic considering Ron's drinking problem that lately they seem to meet in bars or clubs almost exclusively, that always they are in places where it would be awkward, even difficult not to drink.  It as if somehow, in Harry's head, Ron has become inextricably mixed with the taste of neat vodka, so that now he cannot seem to picture one without the other.  Ron is there before him, of course, nursing a large rum and coke in the darkest corner booth.  

            Harry slides in across from Ron, and takes an appreciative sip of the drink Ron ordered for him.  He opens his mouth to say hello, but all that comes out is a thousand complaints about Draco:  how cold he is, how selfish, emotionally distant, cruel…  Ron stares at him as if he's grown a second head.  "Sorry," Harry manages, weakly.  

            Ron has reached that perfect state where he is just drunk enough to say what he thinks, and not too drunk to make sense.  "Merlin, Harry," he responds now.  "What do you expect from him?  This is Draco Malfoy; he practically came with a warning label.  The Malfoys are bred to be selfish and cruel and emotionally distant."

            Harry, defenceless, croaks, "But—."

            "But, nothing."  Ron pokes Harry rather hard in the chest with a blown glass drink stirrer shaped like a fish.  "Harry, has it occurred to you that what you're doing with Malfoy is wrong?"  Harry shakes his head, defeated.  Ron jabs him again.  The waitress comes by to top their drinks off and Ron sends her away.  

            "Look, Harry," he says tiredly, his voice starting to slur but his eyes sad and sober, "You're my oldest friend and I'm meant to be on your side, and I am—but hasn't it occurred to you that Malfoy's emotionally distant because he's emotionally not in the same place as you are?  I mean, he kissed you back, once, ten years ago.  You don't even know if he's gay, much less if he's interested in you!  What you're doing to him—it's borderline rape, Harry; he can't stop you and he wouldn't dare say no.  He can't fight you without a wand, and if he did take you out they'd give him the Kiss so fast even the Dementors' heads would spin.  What you're doing—you take away all a man's options, Harry, it isn't fair.  If he were a woman they'd never have let it go this far, but some of them, and Merlin help us but I think Dumbledore is one of them—they think that any man who would do it voluntarily, deserves whatever he gets.  They're using you, Harry; they're hoping you'll destroy each other."

            Harry shook his head.  "It's not like that," he insisted, and hoped that it was true.  "It's not like that between Malfoy and I, not anymore."


	4. The Man Who Sold the World

Requiem

The Man Who Sold the World

Men say, quite often, that poison is a woman's weapon, that is cheating, somehow dishonest; they say that using it is tantamount to stabbing one's enemies (or one's friends, or given pureblood traditions, quite often one's family) in the back.  Snape has never understood what difference it makes, if one is going to be murdered, whether one is stabbed in the front or in the back.  But Snape is a Slytherin and the son of a Slytherin, and Slytherins know that efficiency is worth more in the end than even style.

            Draco Malfoy is perhaps the most efficient person that Snape has ever met.  All beds are alike to Draco, all weapons, all causes.  Draco, too, is a Slytherin and the son of a Slytherin; he is also the most dangerous man Snape can imagine because he always does what he believes is necessary no matter what the cost.  Draco will not hesitate to stab you, in the back or front, and he will not hesitate to smile at you while he bleeds to death at your feet.  

            Despite this, despite all his great strength, all his rage, all his power, despite his blood that is pure as polished silver for thirty generations—despite this or perhaps because of this, Draco is easy for Snape to hurt.  He wears his heart like a badge of honour on his sleeve; he is after all twenty years Snape's junior and he is fool enough to think he sees something to love in his half-brother.  Snape, older and necessarily wiser, tainted by his mother's blood, scarred by his former master and discarded by his ruthless father, knows that what Draco loves is the reflection of himself.

            He sees something in Snape that is not there:  he has endowed his brother with his own chiseled beauty, his own passionate loyalty.  Draco is perhaps not a fool (the Malfoys do not suffer foolish children) but he sees only what he wants to see in those he loves.  His father becomes a hero, if misguided; his mother is brilliant and cool but not cold or vicious; and of course Severus a martyr and not a madman.  He is dangerously, frivolously, _willfully _blind.

            It is this blindness, this belief that everything will—that everything _must_—come right in the end, that separated Snape and Draco most of all.  Even now, while Snape sits by Draco's bed in the hospital wing of Hogwarts, occasionally reaching out to touch his brother's hand if he thinks no one is looking, the truth is between them like sword blade.  The truth is that their world is long overdue for destruction.  The truth is that Harry Potter will destroy Draco if Dumbledore commands him to.  The truth is that if Draco were as interested in survival as he claims to be, he would have stayed in America.

            If Lucius Malfoy taught his sons one thing, anything at all, it is that one does what one must to survive.  This is a lesson that Snape learned all to well and that Draco did not learn at all.  And so it is Draco, beautiful and beloved, who dances with death like a matador, and it is Snape the ugly and unwanted that stays well clear of the edge.

            This close, Snape can feel Draco's pulse, slow but regular as his own.  He can feel the small sharp ache of the Dark Mark that never goes away, the throb of his never quite healed shoulder, the burn of the fresh cuts on his arms and face.  He can feel Draco's despair, so strong that it is overwhelming.  Draco has always felt things too fiercely; as a child he imagined himself in love with Snape, and was constantly mooning about.  He has always been melodramatic and romantic and temperamental.

            Snape, himself, has always preferred women to men; he cannot quite imagine what it would be like to make love to Draco even if they did not share a bloodline.  He prefers soft round warm bodies in his bed.  Draco is thin and fragile with bones as delicate as a bird's.  His hipbones jut and his ribs protrude and the hollows of his collarbones are deep enough to lose oneself in.  Despite all this he is beautiful, but it is the fierce wild beauty of a bird of prey.  His body is a map of his past and every scar is a stop on the railway to hell.

            There is nothing more difficult than divided loyalties, which Snape knows all too well.  The pull of family.  The pull of duty.  The pull of morality, of greed, of love, friendship, life.  Draco is not torn apart because he follows the path of duty with the fanaticism of a convert.  No, he cannot be torn apart, but he can tear himself apart and this, it is apparent, is what he has done.  Snape is sorry, momentarily, that he cannot be what his brother wants him to be, that he cannot love Draco, but at the same time he is glad.  He thinks Draco must be a very difficult person to love.  And Snape has his own survival to think of, after all.  He goes, leaving Draco to Potter's not-so-tender mercies.


	5. Stay Together for the Kids

Requiem

Stay Together For the Kids 

            Narcissa, ironically, had been given a name that did not suit her at all.  Oh, she was aware of her own beauty; she could hardly have forgotten it, when it was all anyone ever saw of her.  And, to be fair, she would not have gotten as far as she had, had she been born plain.  She was not vain, or conceited; she knew that her looks were merely a matter of chance—chance and genetics—and she would rather have been known for her brilliant mind than her pretty face.  There were days when she wished she had been born short and chubby and cross-eyed and prone to spots.

            Beauty had shaped Narcissa's life from the beginning.  She had been the result of a love-match; her parents were purebred and well-born and shabby poor.  It was her greatest shame—that she had born to a pair of kind, thoughtless idiots.  Her mother had been a great beauty, and expected to do better; her soldier father as handsome as he was worthless.  Narcissa had somehow inherited double their brains, and double their looks, and it was not until she was of an age to enter Hogwarts that she grew to hate her parents.

            It was one thing to be poor.  All the respectable wizarding families were poor then:  the Weasleys, the Malfoys, the Goyles; none of them had any cash to speak of.  Whenever they came up short they sold some silver, a jewel or two, a few hundred acres of land.  Narcissa's parents had nothing to sell.  When it was time for her to go to Hogwarts there was no money at all.  For ten years, until she was well-married and wealthy and established, Narcissa had nightmares about what happened next.

            Her father took her to Hogwarts, to the Headmaster, an old man named Dippet with bad breath and shaking, spotted hands and dirty fingernails.  He left her in the office, telling her to show Dippet how smart she was.  The old man did not touch her, not then; he dared not with her father in the anteroom.  He only leered at her from a safe distance, and told her how pretty she was.  Narcissa was just young enough to be flattered despite her fear; she smiled and simpered and tossed her hair and generally made a cake of herself.

            Dippet rewarded her posturing with a full scholarship, and he did not even ask her to take the test she had expected and studied for.  She came to Hogwarts on the train that autumn, wearing the patched robes her mother had cut down for her, pulling her battered trunk full of Spello-taped books and clutching her new wand.  She was so proud of herself, then; she did not realize there was anything different about her.  She had kissed her handsome father and beautiful mother goodbye on the platform, and seen the stares and heard the whispers, and she did not understand what was wrong.

            On the train no one would sit near her and she did not understand why, but she had always been alone and so she was not bothered by it.  In the end she found an empty compartment and sat idly flipping through her textbooks, wondering what school would be like.  Someone came around with a cart, selling drinks and candy but although she was hungry she knew better than to waste her money on something that wouldn't last.  After several hours, when she had read nearly all of her Transfigurations book and made notes in its margins of several applications not mentioned, a small black-haired boy flung open the door and threw himself on the seat across from her.  The two of them rode the rest of the way in silence, the boy sulking and Narcissa eying him from behind her book.  

            She was sorted into Slytherin house, which puzzled her a bit; her mother had been a Hufflepuff and her father a Gryffindor and they had told her she'd likely be a Ravenclaw.  But she was an obedient child, then; she did what she was supposed to do.  She always had.  When Dippet summoned her to his office, she went:  she went, and she sat in his lap, and she smiled when he told her how pretty she was, and gave her some money to buy herself something small.  She knew, of course, that what he wanted from her was wrong, but she had not been raised to contradict adults.  She knew what he wanted and she did her best to please him.

            In the halls the other children sometimes whispered about her cousin Tom, but to Narcissa Tom Riddle was an awkward man she barely knew, a man her father despised.  She did not listen.  She did not connect Riddle with the other names whispered at Hogwarts, with Voldemort, or Lucius Malfoy.   Lucius was another cousin, the head of her family; she had been a bit in love with him forever.

            By and large Narcissa was happy at Hogwarts, and if she gave up a part of herself to stay there, well, everyone makes certain sacrifices.  She graduated at the top of her class and received a dozen offers from top research firms and think tanks.  She also received an offer of marriage from Lucius, and it seemed to her like a dream come true.  They were married three years later, when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-one; very early on she knew it was a mistake.  Lucius wanted nothing from her he could not have gotten—had not gotten—from other women.

            Night after night she lay in the big bed in Malfoy House, the bed in which a dozen Malfoy heirs had been conceived and several born and several died.  Night after night Lucius lay beside her, a cold pale indifferent shadow on the black satin sheets.  Dippet had made her want to scream, but when she was with Lucius she recited chemical formulas to keep from falling asleep.  Within six months she was pregnant, and she wondered if Lucius had done something to insure conception.  

            There was something about carrying this child--this boy that was her husband's longed for son--that made her want to die.  She slept on her side, because it was the only comfortable position; she could remember being thirteen and seeing Lucius and Tom Riddle, fifteen and seventeen years her senior, standing close together but not touching, the night of Orion Malfoy's funeral.  At the time she had thought they were not touching because Lucius hated Tom; this was strange innocence for a girl who had had none to speak of.

            Seven months in she stood at the top of the stairs and held her breath and let herself fall but Lucius caught her and the baby inside grew healthy and strong and after that she was never alone.  When Draco was born she hated him on sight; he was perfect, beautiful, no mark on him of his parents' sins.  She had heard that Lucius had a bastard son born with the Dark Mark blazoned across his face but she was afraid the darkness in her son went far deeper though it did not show at all.

            It was easy to punish Draco, maybe too easy, and sometimes she found herself punishing him before he had had a chance to do anything wrong.  She slapped him, pulled his hair, shut his fingers in the door.  Draco was only a baby but he knew better than to cry.  When he was four Lucius came home unexpectedly and found she'd locked him in the closet in the dark, because he'd not learned his letters quickly enough.  She tried to explain that it was for his own good, that surely it was better he learn now, from his mother who loved him.  That was when Lucius hit her for the first time, and she missed three weeks of work because she dared not go out until the lump on her jaw disappeared and the bruises faded.  After that Draco had his lessons with his father or more often not all and she saw him only at mealtimes.

            When Draco was nine she had a brief affair with one of the men who worked in her department at the ministry, and Lucius found her out and half killed her.  What was sauce for the goose was not, apparently, sauce for the gander.  Draco came into their bedroom unexpectedly and said something to his father, something she could not quite hear, and after that Lucius left her strictly alone.  There would be no more Malfoy heirs in his generation, but pureblood marriages rarely produced many children anyway.

            When he was thirteen Draco caught his father with Tom Riddle, and after that he came to her asking to be taught the Animagus transfiguration.  He never mentioned the lesson that ended with her holding his hand over a candle flame and sometimes she wondered if he'd forgotten what a terrible mother she'd been.  Her Animagus form was a black bat and his was a peregrine falcon; she was disappointed to see that the experiments she'd done while he was in her womb had apparently come to nothing.  Still, Draco was more intelligent than she remembered, with a quicksilver mind not unlike her own and a tendency to ask unanswerable questions she blamed on his father.

            When Draco was twenty-nine she lost him forever; he came up to her where she sat, James in her lap and Sirius at her back, and she could not manage even one word for him.  Sometimes she wondered what kind of woman she was, even as she made dinner for her husband and built towers of blocks with Jamie.  But Narcissa was a scientist as well as a mother, and she knew that very often the first experiment—the beta test—failed, and that it was not necessarily significant.


	6. Chords of Fame

Requiem

Chords of Fame 

            Hermione knocked, politely, knowing that she was both early and unexpected, and Draco Malfoy told her to come in.  Hermione pushed open the unlocked door and flinched when it swung hard back and caught on a large fruitcake sent by one of Harry's well-wishers.  She had never become comfortable with this lack of security her best friend took for granted.  Harry's living room was a tip, as usual, despite clear efforts to clean it up for the party.  The edges were blunted by stacks of old newspapers, books, Quidditch equipment; empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays were cemented to every surface, and the rug and couched smelled faintly of beer and more strongly of vanilla air freshener.  Someone, probably Malfoy, had made a half-assed attempt to tidy up by polishing around things and taking out the trash.  

            Malfoy and Ron were on the couch, talking softly about something or someone—at a guess, about Harry.  Their heads were so close together they almost touched, pale-gold to red-gold, and Hermione felt a surge of fear.  No one sat like that but lovers and best friends and worst enemies, and Ron had no business being any of those with Malfoy.  Ron, despite the years and the words they both had said, and meant, was hers and he was Harry's.

            Five months later she watched Ron watch Malfoy struggle for breath, while Harry bent over him making small distressed sounds.  I did this, she thought, this is my fault.  In the dimness of the infirmary he looked like a doll, too pretty to be real.  It was hard to imagine that he was a killer, that he was destroying Harry.  Easier to remember the man she had gone to bed with, the man whose baby grew within her even now.  Easier to remember that he had been kind, and gentle, though he had not had to be.  She almost turned and walked away before they saw her, but she had promised herself when she stood for Minister that she would never turn away from any of her people.

            When she stepped into the room Ron looked up at her (and she had heard the expression "his heart was in his eyes" but never seen it) there was something about his face, beloved and betrayed, that made her want to cry.  "Hermione," he said very softly, and he stared at the awkward bulge of her stomach.  Beside him Malfoy turned to look at her but his eyes were unfocused, black against the white of his face.  Beside the bed there was a bowl full of bloody water and she made herself turn away.  

            Ron followed her out into the hall and closed the door firmly behind them.  "Hermione," he said again, and she put out a hand to him.  They had not been this close to one another in years, not since before she had stood for the Ministry and won.  She had asked him, then, why he was not happy for her, and he had said it was because he thought that leadership required gentleness as well as intellect.  People thought that Ron was stupid—even she had thought that once—but somehow he saw the things no one else could see.

            Ron took her hand and turned it palm up.  She thought he meant to kiss it; she set herself to stop it.  Then he was on his knees before her.  "Marry me," he breathed, and Hermione went still.  It was not the first time he had asked her and it would not be the first time she had refused him.  They would only tear one another apart because she was not capable of tenderness and he was not capable of viciousness.  And yet, every day she was without him it was as if she were being torn apart.

            Divorce was rare in the wizarding world, far rarer than it was for Muggles; until twenty years ago it had required an act of parliament to dissolve a marriage.  When her own parents had divorced in the middle of the war Hermione had been embarrassed to tell her friends.  She did not particularly want to raise this baby alone, but what, exactly, was the alternative?  Hope that Ron would suddenly turn into a different person?  That Draco Malfoy would decide she should be the mother of his heirs?  As well hope for the moon as for that.  She might wait her whole life for a prince on a white horse, and die alone.

            This baby was her chance to have what other women had, and Hermione thought sometimes that she would like to carry it forever.  It would be safe, there; it would be hers and hers alone.  But she might not be capable of tenderness, gentleness, any of the feminine virtues, and still she could be capable of generosity.  Why not share this with Ron, really?  If it didn't work—and it wouldn't—at least they would have had a few moments of happiness.  She felt like a war bride when she dropped her eyes to his face and said yes, except that she was the one wearing pants.


End file.
